When Romulus founded Rome, so the story goes, he appointed one hundred upstanding and powerful men to be Senators of the new city. These hundred men elected kings, raised armies, and administered the day to day needs of Roman citizens. Later this number swelled to 300 with the incorporation of the Sabine and Etruscan people, but those original hundred Latins would be important for hundreds of years to come, for they would be known as the Patricians.
The Patricians were the old money of Rome, and everyone who was not a Patrician was a Plebeian. Over time, these distinctions only made a difference for the sake of elected office and plain old discrimination, since several of the Plebes did pretty well for themselves. I find it helpful to think of them in terms of Jew-Gentile, that is, if you are not a Jew, you are a Gentile. Of course, being a Gentile means you could be black, white, asian, hispanic, or really any race on earth that isn't Jewish, making the Gentiles a diverse group by that sort of division. In the same way, while the Patricians were a specific group of old-money aristocrats, a Plebeian might be poor, rich, or even middle class. At the founding of the Republic, they just couldn't be a Senator.
After Rome exiled their king, allegedly in 509 BCE (the Roman historians probably chose this date just to predate Athens' democracy by a year), the Senate took command over the anarchy that ensues when a leader is deposed. They decided that executive authority should never rest with just one man, and thus the position of Consul was created. Every year, the Senate would elect two Consuls for a one-year term, the hope being that if one of them talked to his horse, the other could veto his decision to order the execution of all Rabbits in Italy (a hypothetical scenario, since our records from the early Republic are less than trustworthy). The Romans feared what absolute power could do in the hands of any given man, so they set up a complicated system of checks and balances as seen below:
Sorry if I just gave you flashbacks of U.S. History, but the founding fathers of the United States had a similar fear, which led to a similar system. However, the system displayed in the diagram is the final product; the original was basically Senatorial rule with no recourse for the Plebeians if those ruling Patricians did something they didn't like. Also, the Tribal Assembly wasn't for family tribes, but for regions, similar to our own congressional districts today, except you were part of the tribe that your father belonged to regardless of your current home. So I, for example, would still be included in the Tulare County Tribe even though I now reside in Fresno County because that's where my family comes from.
The tricky thing about Democracy is reassuring the citizens that each of them gets a fair shake. It's a little difficult to ensure the lower class that they're being represented fairly when one requirement for being a Senator was being a Patrician. And not just a Patrician, but a rich one, owning at least 100,000 denarii worth of land which would be several thousand acres (we think). Now, on the one hand, I can see the benefit of Senators who supposedly couldn't be bribed because they're already rich. But I can also see how the Plebeians may have begun looking fondly toward their pitchforks whenever the Senate did something they didn't like.
The creation of the Plebeian Council is, to my mind, one of the most brilliant compromises in the political history of the world. While it still did not give a voice to women or slaves, it did give an unprecedented amount of power to those at the lowest station of Roman life. The Plebeians were allowed to elect a Tribune who had veto power over the wealthy Patrician Senate, thus giving the common freemen of Rome a check against their wealthy and aristocratic overlords.
As the Roman Constitution continued to evolve, Plebeians were eventually given the right to become Senators, if they were elected as a magistrate. But who elected the magistrate? You guessed it: the Senate. In 342 BCE, however, a law passed that required at least one of the Consuls to be a Plebeian.
While this all sounds very progressive and looks wonderful on paper, there was still a huge divide between rich and poor. Most of the Plebeians who were elected to the Senate were very well-off, and the old economic separation between Patrician and Plebeian were already blurring, favoring instead a simple matter of have and have-nots. The one thing the rich could still claim was the protection of Rome, as the army was still staffed by those of the 5th Census class and above, but even that would prove insufficient in later years and the army would eventually be opened to all citizens under the Marian Reforms.
Those reforms would forever change the face of Rome, both militarily and politically. The Senate and other Legislative Councils faced an identity crisis which they failed to deal with, leaving a power vacuum that the Emperors easily filled. The Plebian Tribune who still held veto power over the Senate became little more than just another wealthy and complicit politician whom the Senate could bribe if they needed to. What began as an ancestral caste system changed into an economic class system over time, and failure to recognize the role of economics in politics ultimately brought an end to the Roman Republic.
No comments:
Post a Comment